With the increasing use of stylus and touch sensitive screens to input lines and images into a computer, one problem that has arisen is the poor quality of the freehand drawn lines and shapes, and the resulting difficulty in interpreting the user input. Further there are a number of other difficulties in processing freehand sketched lines and images. First, it is difficult to determine whether a freehand sketched line, that would typically not be straight, is a multiple-segment line with successive segments at angles to each other (a polyline) or is a single straight segment. Further, polysided shapes are often so irregular that the freehand drawing looks sloppy at best and may not be understandable at all by user or computer. The problem then is how to improve a freehand sketch of a line or shape so it may be more clearly understood by the user or any computing system processing the drawings.